Quotes about Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

9 Sourced Quotes

Those who were still able to write beautiful melodies were kitsch composers like Tchaikovsky. Tchaikovsky approaches true art not in his numerous beautiful melodies, but when a melodic line is thwarted.

The radio station was playing Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake, a sure sign that things were much worse than they appeared.

Gary Shteyngart

The Rhapsody is not a composition at all. It's a string of separate paragraphs stuck together — with a thin paste of flour and water… I don't think there has been such an inspired melodist on this earth since Tchaikovsky… but if you want to speak of a composer, that's another matter.

Leonard Bernstein

Roll over Beethoven
And tell Tchaikovsky the news.

There is nothing I long for more intensely than to be taken for a better sort of Tchaikovsky—for heaven's sake: a bit better, but really that's all. Or if anything more, that people should know my tunes and whistle them.

Arnold Schoenberg

Dear William Shakespeare. I am a 14 year old and I'm queer like you. I'm learning art. I wanted to be a queer artist like Leonardo or Michaelangelo. But I like Francis Bacon best I read Alan Ginsberg, Rimbaud. I like Tchaikovsky, if I make films I will make them like Eisenstein, Murnau, Pasolini, Visconti. Love from Derek.

If I play Tchaikovsky I play his melodies and skip his spiritual struggles…If there's any time left over I fill in with a lot of runs up and down the keyboard.

I do not mean that it is not worthwhile to attempt a revision of the canon or that no success is possible. A few valuable minor changes have been made to our sense of the basic material of the history of music, and other alterations are still waiting to take hold. Gesualdo has not displaced Monteverdi or Palestrina but has won a permanent place; on the other hand, the attempt to convince us that Telemann is a major composer appears to have been abandoned. Alkan has not had the breakthrough his admirers had hoped for. Attacks on Tchaikovsky have not had much success in removing his music from the repertory; his credit with performers has not changed a bit.

Tchaikovsky thought of committing suicide for fear of being discovered as a homosexual, but today, if you are a composer and not homosexual, you might as well put a bullet through your head.

Sergei Diaghilev